William Golding

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and educated at Oxford, where he read English after switching from natural sciences. He taught English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury before and after World War II, interrupted by naval service that included participation in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and command of a rocket-launching craft during the D-Day landings at Normandy. The war did not produce in him, as it did in some writers, a qualified optimism about human resilience. It produced the opposite. He had seen what happened when the structures fell.

Lord of the Flies was his first novel and was rejected by 21 publishers before Faber & Faber accepted it on the recommendation of an editor named Charles Monteith, who would later also champion Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1954. The premise engages directly with The Coral Island (1857) by R.M. Ballantyne, a Victorian adventure novel in which British boys stranded on a tropical island create a fine little civilization. Golding takes the same setup — a group of British boys, evacuees from a nuclear war, stranded on a tropical island — and follows it to a different conclusion. The boys create a functioning society and then dismantle it. Ralph's democratic impulse, Piggy's rationalism, and Simon's intuitive moral clarity are progressively overwhelmed by Jack's appeal to violence and release. Simon's death — he is killed by the other boys while trying to tell them the beast is not real, that it is within them — is the novel's moral center.

Golding's subsequent novels are less well known and arguably more interesting. The Inheritors (1955) is told from the perspective of a Neanderthal community being displaced by Homo sapiens — the alien consciousness of the narration is a formal achievement as difficult as Faulkner's Benjy section, and the implication that our species' victory over the Neanderthals was not a triumph of reason but of violence and cunning is more disturbing than anything in Lord of the Flies. Pincher Martin (1956) gives a drowning Naval officer six apparent minutes of consciousness in which he reconstructs his entire life, with a revelation at the end that reconfigures everything preceding it. Rites of Passage (1980), a shipboard novel set in the early 19th century, won the Booker Prize.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. The Nobel committee's citation praised "novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today." The award was not universally welcomed — Anthony Burgess, who wanted it, was publicly bitter — and there were critics who considered Golding a one-book author receiving the honor partly on the strength of Lord of the Flies' curriculum penetration. That curriculum penetration is itself a complication: the novel is one of the most-taught in the English-speaking world, which means most readers first encounter it as a duty at 14 or 15, in a classroom, with a teacher telling them what it means. The novel has probably been resented by more readers who would have loved it under other conditions than any other comparable text.

His posthumously published journal, The Double Tongue (1995), and John Carey's authorized biography William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (2009) significantly complicate the public image — Golding struggled with alcoholism, depression, and a moral reckoning with his own capacity for violence that his fiction was, in part, an attempt to understand.